Tacolicious owner Sara Deseran first discovered this smoky salad, from Neil Fraser of LA’s Redbird, while cooking at the annual Sabores San Miguel festival in Mexico. The trick to getting tender, flavorful octopus is boiling it first, then marinating and grilling it.
A French bistro staple, this provençal salad combines tuna, olives, cucumber, green beans, anchovies, and other spring vegetables for a filling and protein-rich meal.
This flavorful mix of broccoli, cauliflower, zucchini, and potatoes is braised in olive oil that’s been infused with rosemary, chile flakes, lemon, and anchovies. Get the recipe for Olive Oil-Braised Vegetables »
The crisp-fried veal topped with luscious egg, salty anchovies, and capers is a brilliant study in contrasting flavors and textures. Get the recipe for Schnitzel à la Holstein »
This Italian classic, whose Italian name means warm bath, provides the perfect counterpoint to raw vegetables. This recipe is based on one in Essentials of Classic Italian Cuisine (Knopf, 1992) by Marcella Hazan.
Capers and anchovies lend briny depth to this parsley sauce, which is fantastic tossed with grilled or boiled vegetables, and with rich fish like mackerel.
Based on a dish served at Birrificio Italiano, a brewery and restaurant in Italy’s Lombardy region, this puttanesca-style pasta sauce is enriched with Bibock, the brewery’s bock-style beer.
At Savron, a restaurant in Trieste, Italy, they roast cuts of pork and veal and then pave a serving plate with cold thin slices of each and slathers on these two flavorful sauces. At home, use the sauces to dress up leftover meats—pork or veal or a combination of the two. The color of the anchovy sauce will vary according to the variety of anchovies used; plump, rosy ones, which are usually packed in glass jars, tend to yield a thicker, more richly hued sauce.
The versatile sauce used here comes from Rogers Gray Italian Country Cook Book (Random House, 1995), by Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray, chef-owners of London’s acclaimed (and very Italian) River Cafe. It can be used not only as a dip for radicchio and other vegetables, but also spooned over grilled or roasted fish or lamb. Rogers and Gray recommend green Tuscan olive oil.
Sauce vierge (literally, virgin sauce, a reference to its uncooked character) belongs to a family of fresh French Mediterranean sauces that differ greatly from the rich, stock-based sauces commonly associated with classical French cooking. Also called green sauce, sauce aux herbes, and sauce verte, it is usually a piquant mixture of olive oil, herbs, mustard, capers, olives, and other aromatics. In this version, chiles add a spicy, new-world dimension. Besides accompanying steak, this sauce goes well with grilled or sauteed pork chops or tuna. Get the recipe for Grilled Steak with Sauce Vierge »